Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 05, 2009 @04:27PM
from the this-game-sucks-you-try-it dept.

revjtanton writes "Amid all the discussion and argument about Gamestop's two-billion-dollar trade-in industry it seems Amazon.com is getting in on the action.
Like Gamestop, Amazon asks for the games to be in good condition, however they offer just a few more dollars for your discarded game (Gamestop listed Left 4 Dead for the 360 at $24 while Amazon had it at $26.50 trade-in value). Gamestop had already ruffled feathers in the developer and distribution communities with its practice of accepting used games; does Amazon joining the practice legitimize it?"

I've found that for online game trading Goozex [goozex.com] beats everything else by a mile. Buyers and sellers get the same price with only a $1 transaction fee to Goozex (plus you pay shipping if you're the seller--but free shippinig for buyers). Goozex then acts as an arbiter to resolve disputes (though I've yet to ever have one and from what I can tell by the forums, it seems pretty rare for everyone else too). If you try out a game and decide it's not your style (or if you simply beat it) you can get full money back minus the $1 fee and shipping as long as you didn't hold onto it so long that the value of the game has gone down.

To top it off, when you first start they give you a free $5 game (or $5 toward a more expensive game). Every other online site I've tried practically gives you peanuts for a game that they resell for much more.

Uh... not sure where you're getting those numbers, but that's innacurate. If you were to buy a game on release day for $60, open it, and then sell it right back, they'd put it on the shelf for $55. If you were to buy the game on release, wait two months, and then sell it back, they might put it at $50 if it was a good game that still had demand, $30 if it were an average game. A game that is 2 years old that is good, more like $20. If it's average (like madden,) it will be more like $5.

It's called gifting. I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, but later bought the Orange Box. It notified me that I had one extra copy of HL2 and I was able to give it as a gift to one of my buddies.

OrangeBox was a partial exception. A one time special deal for Orange Box buyers who already had other components of the game. It is not generally true. (And it only applied to duplicate components... you couldn't gift features you only had one of.)

You can gift any game that you've purchased. Just have someone send you paypal, then gift the game to their username.

Why don't you try just that? You are wrong. It **doesn't work**.

You can buy a game and gift it (but you have to buy it 'as a gift' and you absolutely can't play it yourself first), and who ever receives it can't gift it again.

"A Steam gift purchase is a one-time transfer--after the recipient has activated and installed the game, it is a non-refundable game in his or her Steam games collection. Also note that you may only gift new purchases--you may not transfer games you already own. That'd be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you've used every morning for the past year."

or further down:

"You can not gift games that were previously purchased on your Steam account to friends. Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One can be gifted when purchased as part of the Orange Box package. For more information about Orange Box gifting, please see..."

They couldn't be more clear that you can't transfer games you already own (OrangeBox duplicates being the ONLY exception.)

You can sell your Steam games. By saying otherwise you're just spreading FUD.

No you can't. Its you that is spreading misinformation. Sad thing is, I believe you genuinely believed you were right, which means their whole 'gifting' system marketing has completely deluded you into thinking it worked the way you thought it worked. But it doesn't, and you wouldn't have found out until you actually tried to gift one of you other used games and found you couldn't. At which point it is FAR to late to do anything about it.

I have spoken with support, argued with them live and via email over this on a number of occasions. I have actually TRIED to gift a in my account that isn't an orange box duplicate.

Don't trust me on this; do your own research. But unfortunately you WILL find that I am right.

Right now, I have six binders which hold ~200 CDs each sitting on the floor of my computer room these contain the CDs for every game and program I've bought since software was sold on CD.

I have four binders holding my DVD collection.

I have two binders holding my music collection.

I have two binders holding my console video game collection.

And I never, ever, plan on selling any of that to a used game company. Not because I have moral issues with it, but because for me, being able to go back and replay Dungeon Keeper 2 once every three years is worth the effort.

For me, Steam has no downside regarding the used game market. The upsides however, are immense. Every game I buy on Steam is that many less CDs and DVDs to store in those binders. It's one less item to OCD over trying to digitize because I'm worried that some day the original media will deteriorate and I won't be able to use it anymore.